Deep in the Fringe on a tramp freighter, Jewel Aurora is about to discover that there are much worse things than being forced into a marriage to secure her parents’ fortune. On the edges of human space, where no one can be trusted with your back, the young woman is about to stumble upon a fortune that star nations will go to war to possess. It’s a treasure that has already killed two sets of colonists who tried to claim it. And if anyone learns she and her crewmates have found it, it is absolutely certain to attract the attention of the two influential families she turned fugitive to escape—assuming, of course, that she and her shipmates are not the third set of victims to die on a cold little world far from the core of galactic civilization.
Jewel’s days as a fugitive are over. She wakes from cold sleep, captive on an Armenite warship with her past rapidly catching up to her. Her parents are arriving soon to force her to marry Kole Delling, the Armenite man she fled into the Fringe to escape. And if that fate isn’t bad enough, some of the Armenites want to execute her and her surviving crew members for their legitimate salvage operations in the Valkyrie system. The walls are closing in, but Jewel isn’t ready to give up. It’s time for the galaxy to learn just how difficult it is to keep a Cartelite Princess prisoner.
Jewel’s arranged marriage, designed to bring peace and prosperity to the Hegemony of Armen and the Cartelite Worlds, is instead stoking the furnaces of inter-galactic warfare. From the moment of her marriage, the enemies of her Armenite husband—a stern and rigid man she barely knows—seek to use her to prove that the Cartel Worlds are unworthy of an alliance which monopolizes the fuel that makes faster-than-light travel possible. Complicating Jewel’s efforts to protect herself and her people are disturbing changes in her very cell structure—changes she doesn’t want or understand but that place her squarely in the targeting reticle of the Armenite opposition. Jewel finds herself having to use her wits and her lifelong training in negotiation and intrigue to preserve a marriage she never wanted to be part of in order to prevent a civilization ending war.
Jewel’s new husband wants her to be a properly low-key and obedient Armenite wife. Her brother-in-law wants to humiliate her and steal her fortune to further his own ambitions. Her old crewmates want her to rescue them from their sentence of servitude. And worst of all, the microscopic menites swarming inside of Jewel want to transform her into something her husband’s enemies believe is an abomination against The Unity while his allies hope they are fashioning her into its salvation. With no one to truly depend upon but herself, the Cartelite princess must withstand these competing demands, and—In order to avoid galactic war—learn what it truly means to be an Armenite empyreal.
Jewel ran away from an arranged marriage and the Cartel Worlds with just her wits to help her. She returns as one of the wealthiest and most sought-after people in the galaxy. But with great wealth comes even greater danger. Jewel and her new husband must navigate social norms and political mazes that make avoiding hit squads look easy. And the friends of her childhood aren’t quite the people she remembers. They’re all anxious to renew their relationships with her, but which of them are truly trustworthy? Jewel once forced the narrow-minded Armenites to realize that she was indeed an Empyreal. Now she must remind her own people that she is still a Cartelite!